Giffords’s Husband Faces Decision on Shuttle Flight

Gabrielle Giffords’s husband must decide whether to move ahead with commanding the space shuttle in April.

JOHN SCHWARTZ

As Representative Gabrielle Giffords settles into a rehabilitation hospital in Houston, a major question remains for her husband, the astronaut Mark E. Kelly: Will he fly or not?

Captain Kelly, a Navy officer who flew 39 combat missions in the Persian Gulf war, is scheduled to fly the shuttle Endeavour on a two-week mission to the International Space Station in April.

With his wife at the beginning of a long and arduous rehabilitation program to recover from a gunshot wound to the head, Captain Kelly and his bosses at NASA will have to determine whether he can maintain the training regimen in the weeks leading up to the launching and command the mission.

It would be Captain Kelly’s fourth trip to space, but with the shuttle program winding down, giving up this flight would almost certainly mean also giving up his last chance to command a shuttle mission. No shuttle commander has ever been removed so close to a launching.

“We’re not there yet,” Stephanie Schierholz, a NASA spokeswoman, said of when Captain Kelly and NASA’s leadership would decide.

While working through the decision, NASA has kept its options open by naming a backup commander for the mission, Frederick W. Sturckow.

“Mark is still the commander,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the chief astronaut, but she said that having a backup commander would allow the crew to continue training and Captain Kelly to “focus on his wife’s care.”

Captain Kelly, who is on leave, said in the NASA announcement of a backup commander that he had recommended the step “to prepare to complete the mission in my absence, if necessary.” But he added that he was “very hopeful that I will be in a position to rejoin” the crew.

John M. Logsdon, an emeritus professor of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, said, “I don’t envy them the choice.”

“Mark is not irreplaceable for this mission,” Professor Logsdon said, “and naming a backup is the prudent thing for NASA to do. There are many highly qualified shuttle commanders. But to lose this opportunity would be personally very hard for him, since it would most likely be his last chance to go to space.”

Captain Kelly might be able to return to orbit, ferried aloft by a Russian Soyuz, as part of an expedition on the space station, as his brother Scott is now doing. But strapping into the left seat of the shuttle’s forward flight deck is the pinnacle of the pilot’s calling.

The ultimate decision involves weighing Captain Kelly’s determination to achieve a goal he has trained so long for and the needs of his family, as well as NASA’s need to have a commander whose concentration and focus are unwavering and the cohesiveness of a crew that has worked closely to achieve a common goal. NASA has no rigid rules about removing crew members from missions.

The Navy, where Captain Kelly got his training, has taken pilots who are going through family crises off flight status, but the decisions are made by the commanding officer with advice from a “human factors board” that involves flight surgeons and officers, said Lt. Aaron Kakiel, a Navy spokesman. “There’s no automatic something that triggers something else,” he said.

Shuttle crew members have been replaced because of illness or family crises. In 1997, Jeffrey S. Ashby, a retired Navy captain, was replaced on what would have been his first shuttle mission when his wife, Diana, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Steven A. Hawley, a former astronaut who flew with Captain Ashby on a later mission, recalled that “he didn’t have the ability to focus properly on the mission,” and that Captain Ashby had recommended the move himself.

“I always admired that very much,” Dr. Hawley said. “That someone would have the presence of mind to recognize that that was going on and make that courageous and appropriate decision — you don’t always assume people will do that.”

Experienced fighter pilots like Captain Kelly are better equipped than most to deal with personal crises, said N. Wayne Hale Jr., a former director of the shuttle program who left NASA last year. “Folks who are in the business — particularly those who came up as military pilots — are very good at compartmentalizing the work they have to do in the cockpits of the spacecraft from their personal lives.”

“We’ve had commanders who had plenty of personal angst in their lives, and they flew great flights,” Mr. Hale said. “It really comes down to where he thinks his priorities and his mental state are.”

In fact, if Ms. Giffords’s recovery is on track, she might urge her husband to take on the challenge, said George Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Center. “I think Gabrielle would want him to fly,” he said. “She is a great supporter of his career. She would say fly, but I think a lot of it is really going to be up to Mark.”

Mr. Abbey also suggested that the launching might be delayed, as often happens. “He’s going to get more time,” Mr. Abbey predicted.

The astronaut community is tight, bound by common careers and experiences, and by tragedy. Today’s members of the astronaut corps lost colleagues and friends when the shuttle Columbia broke up during its return to Earth in February 2003. From the fire aboard Apollo 1 that killed three astronauts to the loss of 14 astronauts in the shuttles Columbia and Challenger, which broke apart after liftoff in 1986, astronauts and their families say they are open about the worst that might happen.

As he prepared for his 2006 mission, Captain Kelly answered questions from NASA’s media office about the risks astronauts prepare for. “Strapping into a rocket ship is something you don’t do lightly,” he said, adding that he had talked to his daughters about the risks, which they knew well having grown up with the children of astronauts who died in the Columbia accident.

Those risks, he said, have to be balanced against reward. “It’s not just the personal benefit to me; it’s what’s the benefit of our space program to our country and to the planet, and I think that’s — that’s pretty, pretty big.”

But while astronauts and their families may be better prepared for crisis than others, the danger is usually associated with the astronauts, not their families, said Eileen Hawley, a former NASA public affairs official and the wife of Dr. Hawley.

“We’re a community that’s typically prepared for risk, and we understand it,” she said, “but not when it’s something like this.”